Moral Transformation and the Love of Beauty in Plato’s Symposium

This paper offers a new interpretation of Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. Diotima’s purpose, in discussing the lower lovers, is to critique their erōs as aimed at a goal it can never secure, immortality, and as focused on an inferior object, oneself. By contrast, in loving beauty, the philosopher gains a mortal sort of completion; in turning outside of himself, he also ceases to be preoccupied by his own incompleteness.